Over the Christmas and New Year break of 1993–1994 I sat in a cold and damp cottage on the outskirts of St. Andrews, Scotland, writing up my master’s thesis. I was trying to make sense of the fact that a war between two Marxist-inspired rebel armies in eastern Africa had concluded with the establishment of two democratic states. I remembered a conversation with one rebel–turned–government minister during my fieldwork in the region some months earlier. He had expressed frustration and shock at discovering that if a new state, such as Eritrea then was, wanted international financial support,...

On March 4, 1493, the Genoan Christopher Columbus wrote to his royal Spanish sponsors announcing the discovery of the Americas:

Most powerful sovereigns: all of Christendom should hold great celebrations, and especially God’s Church, for the finding of such a multitude of friendly peoples, which with very little effort will be converted to our Holy Faith, and so many lands filled with so many goods very necessary to us in which all Christians will have comfort and profits, all of which was unknown nor did anyone speak of it except in fables.²

Columbus’ characterization of the available knowledge concerning the...

With these words, written in 1808, some three hundred years after the initial discovery, the famous scientific explorer Alexander von Humboldt conveys the profound sense of loss and mortification that his encounter with the American Indian provoked. Although dedicated, like the writings of Columbus before him, to His Catholic Majesty of mainland Spain, Humboldt’sPolitical Essay on the Kingdom of New Spainmakes no secret of the reason behind the native population’s current condition of degradation. But although he attributes blame directly to the “European ferocity” and “Christian fanaticism” that characterized much of early colonial rule, Humboldt’s humane recognition of...

While some commentators have interpreted the Mexican postwar compromise of the early independence years as a triumph of reactionary thinking, others have considered the period a paradigmatic example of political chaos.¹ The first interpretation is certainly correct in that the initial uprising of the masses triggered by Hidalgo concluded with the deal making of a creole elite, a scenario that, although dressed in liberal rhetoric, led to little significant change for Mexico’s millions of indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, and despite the common attachment to the legality of a constitution and other more pervasive ideas about liberal economics, the remaining vestiges of...

Initially born of a legitimate campaign against the reelection of Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican Revolution became a combustible mixture of elite dissatisfaction, popular resentment, foreign interest, and political ideology. Its greatest achievement was probably the 1917 constitution, with the inclusion of the all-important article 27, a legislative measure that restricted the ownership of Mexican land to Mexican nationals and in so doing provided for the redistribution of property so central to the agrarian demands of the rural masses. In the end, though, the revolution was won by the members of an elite regional faction that had first sought to replace...

Ever since armed rebels attacked the military barracks of Ciudad Madera in Chihuahua, northern Mexico, on September 23, 1965, successive Mexican governments have been aware of the existence ofguerrilleroswilling to contest the country’s status quo by military means.¹ One longtime student of Mexican guerrilla groups, Carlos Montemayor, identifies the Chihuahua attack as the beginning of a period of over three decades of nearly uninterrupted and “unofficial” warfare that continues to this day. Although figures never reached the horrific magnitude of the state-sanctioned campaigns in other Latin American nations such as Argentina and Chile, Mexico’s own “dirty war” claimed...

And so, on the morning of January 1, 1994, Mexico was once more dramatically and violently awakened to the all-but-obscured social reality of an incensed indigenous populace that had reached the limits of human endurance. With the armed occupation of seven of the main towns in the southeastern state of Chiapas, the soldiers of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) provided the world and Mexico with a palpable reminder—lest they had been completely convinced by the Mexican government’s insistent claims to first-world status—that here in Mexico, despite all assertions to the contrary, there still existed levels of...

It would be easy and understandable to characterize the Zapatista movement as romantic. To a certain extent it is. But what the seemingly romantic elements of the rebellion invite is not criticism for their perceived lack of realism but self-reflection upon our own received expectations of real politics. We must ask ourselves how it is that we have come to presume that the true nature of politics involves top-down instrumental and structural proposals. As we are forced to look away from the official and traditionally recognized centers of power, so too should we be forced to question how we understand...